"Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative.
And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it
intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless
except in so far as it educates themselves." G. M. Trevelyan.

"To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different
picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and
directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might
easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and
application, but lead to essentially different conclusions." Jacob Burckhardt

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates
reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us
tidings of antiquity." Cicero

"The past is useless. That explains why it is past." Wright Morris

"Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however
patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the
most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning
or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of
the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the
character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself
be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes." Francis
Parkman

"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies,
and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon

"There is properly no history; only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you
have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for
all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both
examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through
and through, to avoid." Livy

"What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never
have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
G. W. F. Hegel

"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of
history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and
contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of
life." Fernand Braudel

"The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate
himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the
understanding of the present." E. H. Carr

"If you do not like the past, change it." William L. Burton

"History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is
rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is
not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to
work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men
pursuing their purposes." Karl Marx

"An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place
and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view."
Samuel Eliot Morison

"History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing,
first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of
person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are
and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since
nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do
is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man
has done and thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood

"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford

"That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so
as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by
writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if
we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our
friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack
writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and
they in turn should be constantly on their guard." Polybius

"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the
contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that
high office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von Ranke

"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all
created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of
history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in
some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many
as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them
to slip away into the abyss of oblivion." Anna Comnena

"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud

"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich Nietzsche

"The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He
constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact." Yosef
Hayim Yerushalmi

"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the
history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own
time." Frederick Jackson Turner